Some members of Vortex came together from June 7th to June 9th to create our own robot in 3 days. We wanted to be very original with our design and I truly believe we were able to accomplish that successfully. We hope that this robot can help influence teams with the route they decide to take in Tower Takeover and if you have any questions about the bot, we would be happy to answer them!
Robot Reveal:
Robot Specs:
-4m 5:3 200 RPM chassis with 3.25" omni wheels
-1m 1:5 600 RPM cascade lift
-1m 1:5 200 RPM chain bar lift
-Pneumatics (5 pistons used: 2 on the front cube intake, 1 on the back cube intake, and 2 on the cube “barn door” opener/closer)
Thanks again and good luck to all this season!
Nolan, EKSDE1
We wanted to try something different than what had already been done. So while our robot may not be as competition ready, we got to try out a bunch of newer concepts we want to incorporate into future robots.
Currently, it can stack 2 stacks of 6 cubes (12 cubes total) at its full capacity. It did have a capacity of 8 cubes per stack at the end of the second day, but we had to narrow down the basket height to fit within 18x18x18.
The basket was also probably the hardest part and you will be able to see this in the documentary we are going to release soon because we had to switch up the actual design multiple times due to the time, as well as size, constraints.
Other than that, we found that vertical stacking wasn’t as hard (or as much tuning) as we initially thought and encourage all teams to try out this method of stacking during the season.
It could pick up one cube at a time if both stacks were already at least 1 cube high, but we ending up running out of time to make this function well tuned. If we had more time, we would have put a lexan sheet in between the two stacks to make them both work independently but unfortunately, the three days just flew by.
Thanks for the awesome words about the cage though, I’m happy we were able to pull that off!